Wellness Blog: Breathe In … Breathe Out

Wellness Blog: Breathe In … Breathe Out

Humans need all sorts of nutrients on a daily basis to stay healthy. But many of us never think of oxygen being an essential nutrient. We know we need it at all times, and we know we can’t live without it. But it’s always there for our taking, right? We breathe in, and we breathe out. End of story, right?

Well, many people don’t associate oxygen with deficiency problems. Read on to find out more.

Seventy percent of elimination from your body is through breathing. When we allow our bodies to accumulate toxins we are inviting illness and disease. Medical testing has proven again and again that the missing link in those with cancer and other serious diseases is simply oxygen.

Periannan Kuppusamy, PhD, professor of radiology at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, sees a link between the results of the present study to the age-old practice of breathing exercises for human well-being. He says, “Controlled breathing can increase tissue oxygenation, and if practiced on a daily basis, can lead to suppression of disease progression.”

To read the entire article, go to http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131004105238.htm

One major problem is that oxygen concentrations in and around major cities have been measured at as much as 30 percent below normal. That means that each breath brings in less oxygen. Combine that with the fact that most people have developed poor breathing habits, further restricting oxygen intake, and we’re losing out on a valuable, essential nutrient our entire body needs.

Raymond Francis, the director of Beyond Health Corporation, says that optimal breathing can become a wonderful tool, helping you to relax and reduce stress, improve your skin tone, sleep better, as well as losing inches and weight. We have been breathing incorrectly for so long that we are not aware of how to breathe to receive maximum benefits from each breath. Once we re-learn how to breathe correctly we can use the breath when it is most needed during stress. Many of you are aware that you normally take shallow, minimal breaths, just barely enough to survive.

If so many of us have unhealthy breathing habits, how do we breathe the right way? Michael White, a breathing coach, suggests the following:

1. Breathe through the nose
The breath should go in and out through the nose. Your nose is filter that refines and prepares the air coming in to be used by the body as effectively as possible.

2. Use your diaphragm
The air you breath in through your nose should go all the way down to your belly.

3. Breathe relaxed
No matter what we want to do, we do it better if we are relaxed. Since breathing reflects our thoughts, feelings and body, it means that situations that have us feeling tense also lead to tense and stressed breathing, which leads to a lack of oxygen, which causes even more stress.

4. Breathe rhythmically
Everything has a natural rhythm, and your body is no different. Optimal breathing has a rhythm of its own. Get into that rhythm.

5. Breathe silently
Coughing, snoring and sniffling: it’s easy to ignore these sounds as we make them, but it disrupts breathing, which can cause strain on the body.